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directions to the house, but I told him how to get to your office and said you’d meet him there at eight o’clock.
Bueno?
”
    “
Bueno
,” I said, pouring Richard and me both cups of death-strong cowboy coffee while Celestina flipped the hot cakes. “
Gracias
. Who was it?”
    “Wouldn’t tell me.”
    That wasn’t especially unusual in my business. People called with secret information and sometimes even wore silly disguises to deliver it in person.
    After breakfast, I gave Richard a lift down to the chopper, where Christian waited in the comfortable cabin, poring over his standard three feet of paperwork and getting fed up with Richard’s and my long, lingering kiss good-bye.
    “For God’s sake, Lilly.” Christian’s bushy black eyebrows frowned at me over his sparkling blue eyes. “He’s just going to the office, not on a shuttle mission.” He was only pretending to be perturbed, though. Everyone in the family was happy that Richard and I were about to make it official.
    They were airborne practically before the door was closed. I watched, the sun at my back, until they were no bigger than a mosquito before heading back to the house to get cleaned up.
    I had to go to town later to return some recovered jewels to a client, so, instead of jeans, I slipped into loose black trousers, a cashmere sweater set, and suede pumps, laid on a few pearls—every year seems to require another strand—threw Baby into the Jeep, and took off for my international headquarters in Bennett’s Fort, a small tourist-trap town that sits at the edge of the ranch—a gaudy carbuncle on the Circle B’s generous two-hundred-thousand-acre hips—the way Angeles City had leeched itself onto the edge of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines.
    Bennett’s Fort is the kind of place that was authentic at one time, sort of like Central City or Blackhawk or Cripple Creek, Colorado. These towns used to house what little urban history we have here in the West.They’d been boomtowns in the big silver- and gold-mining eras in the mid- to late nineteenth century and were jam-packed with a unique combination of ornate, gingerbread Victorian architecture and severe, rough-plank Wild West structures. Today, because those once-historic towns are now gambling centers, the landmark buildings have either vanished altogether or been converted into glitzy, high-tech casinos catering to people whose sense of history is limited to who won the last Super Bowl.
    The history itself has been annihilated.
    Even the Central City Opera House, one of the prettiest historic opera houses in the world, where grand opera is still presented every summer, is no longer worth the trip. Who wants to get dressed up, drive for an hour from Denver through a hot canyon behind a diesel-belching tour bus, and spend the evening being gawked at by some fat slob in too-tight polyester shorts and a Day-Glo Spider-Man T-shirt with a cigarette glued to her bottom lip and a tub of quarters in her grungy paw? Not me.
    Bennett’s Fort had once been an honest-to-God wooden fort, built by my great-great-grandfather for the cavalry to withstand Indian attacks. Then, as skirmishes gave way to cattle drives, a “town” grew up outside the front gate, and such elements of polite civilization as the GOLDEN NUGGET SALOON—SASPARILLY ONLY FIVE DOLLARS A SHOT and HOTEL—MISS KITTY AND TEDDY ROOSEVELT SLEPT HERE and JAIL—SEE WYATT EARP’S DESK AND SIX-SHOOTERS lined its dirt street.
    Today, Bennett’s Fort—which is owned by my cousin Bucky Bennett: Mayor for Life—is one of Wyoming’s most successful tourist traps. He has added well-known Victorian/Old Western historic commercial venues such as: Ye Olde Rock Shoppe, Ye Olde RockCandy and Salt Water Taffy Shoppe, Ye Olde Tintype Studio, where a boy can dress up as Jesse James or Wyatt Earp and a girl as a dance-hall floozy in a black-satin corset, torn fishnet stockings and garters and stick a pheasant feather in her hair and they